Se7en said:

At home and work, I just use iTunes.

In my Jeep, I have a tiny USB drive that contains everything (audio) that I have of Prince and related artists. Official and bootleg. It's not organized at all - just album folders loaded onto it. The radio sorts it all out by whatever you choose . . . Song, Artist, Album, Genre, etc. I usually just leave it on Shuffle and enjoy what comes next.

That is exactly how i do, too!

...and every song that comes up randomly seems to fit the situation perfectly

drfeld said:

lurker316 said:

I completely agree. There is no right or wrong. You just need to do something that makes sense to you, and be consistent. Though, no matter what system you come up with there will be a few songs that could easily go more than one category/album/folder. So I end up spending a lot of mental power on a small handful of songs.

When you organize, are you just soring them into new folders? Or are you adjusting the metadata as well, so that when you import them into a music app they sort in your prefered way?

What do you mean by "builing a custom digital asset managment system to catalg" your tracks? Is that a fancy way of saying you're plugging them into a spread sheet? I've started doing that myself, noting not just the song time and year, but I also have a notes column for some of that background into I got from PrinceVault.

I warned you that my system is overly complicated:

Short version: I'm writing my own software.

Less short version: I plan and build apps professionally and specialize in developing online content management systems that run sites with 100K digital multimedia assets or more, so I'm building a custom browser-based cloud application that'll catalog all the material -- audio, video, text (think lyrics, articles, interviews, reviews, etc.), images, etc. -- and make it cross referenced, filterable and fully indexed and searchable. Imagine a more sophisticated version of iTunes (and definitely better looking).

The audio and video files will be streamable from a central server to whatever device I'm using (laptop, desktop, mobile, TV, smart speaker, whatever), so I won't need to worry about what file physically resides where. Everything will be based on information in a database instead of metadata in a particular audio file or a folder structure. This will allow me call up, say, all material from a particular year, or album, or tracks featuring Blackwell on drums, or all versions of a particular song, or a minimum audio quality, or certain keys or beats per minute, etc. -- or any combination thereof. In the case of audio or video, it can automatically build playlists. It'll also contain all my personal notes or comments.

That's it in a nutshell. Yes, I am a geek.

I would be very intrigued to talk to you more about this. I am a web developer and have been looking for a way to manage a large archive of videos and photos for a personal project.

I don't.

scramblelock said:

drfeld said:

That's it in a nutshell. Yes, I am a geek.

I would be very intrigued to talk to you more about this. I am a web developer and have been looking for a way to manage a large archive of videos and photos for a personal project.

Happy to. Send me an "orgnote".